gomory-hu-tree

A Rust implementation of Gomory-Hu Cut Tree Construction, providing efficient all-pairs minimum cut queries. After an initial preprocessing step to build the tree (typically O(N * MaxFlowTime)), the minimum cut value between any pair of nodes can be queried efficiently (currently O(N) in this implementation, with potential for O(log N)).

Features

Gusfield's Algorithm: Implements the simplified algorithm by Gusfield (1990) for tree construction.
Max-Flow Backend: Uses Dinic's algorithm as the default max-flow solver.
Graph Representation: Includes a basic directed graph representation (AdjacencyListFlowGraph) suitable for flow algorithms, using petgraph internally.
Query API: Allows querying min-cut values between vertex pairs using the constructed tree (GomoryHuTree::min_cut_value).
DOT Output: Trees can be exported to DOT format for visualization (GomoryHuTree::to_dot).
Testing: Includes unit, integration (academic cases), and property-based tests.
Benchmarking: Performance benchmarks for construction and queries are available via cargo bench.

Quick Start

Add to Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
gomory_hu_tree = "1.0.0"

Basic Usage:

use gomory_hu_tree::{gusfield_tree, DinicSolver, AdjacencyListFlowGraph, GomoryHuError};

fn main() -> Result<(), GomoryHuError> {
    // 1. Create a graph (e.g., a line graph 0-1-2)
    let mut graph = AdjacencyListFlowGraph::new();
    let n0 = graph.add_node(()); // node 0
    let n1 = graph.add_node(()); // node 1
    let n2 = graph.add_node(()); // node 2

    // Add undirected edges (as pairs of directed edges with same capacity)
    graph.add_edge(n0, n1, 10.0); graph.add_edge(n1, n0, 10.0); // 0-1 with capacity 10
    graph.add_edge(n1, n2, 5.0);  graph.add_edge(n2, n1, 5.0);  // 1-2 with capacity 5

    // 2. Initialize a MaxFlowSolver
    let solver = DinicSolver::new();

    // 3. Build Gomory-Hu tree
    let gh_tree = gusfield_tree(&graph, &solver)?;

    // 4. Query minimum cut values
    // For the line graph 0 --10-- 1 --5-- 2:
    // Min-cut(0,1) = 10.0
    // Min-cut(1,2) = 5.0
    // Min-cut(0,2) = 5.0 (bottleneck on path 0-1-2 in the GH tree)

    println!("Min-cut between node {} and {}: {}", n0, n1, gh_tree.min_cut_value(n0,n1));
    println!("Min-cut between node {} and {}: {}", n1, n2, gh_tree.min_cut_value(n1,n2));
    println!("Min-cut between node {} and {}: {}", n0, n2, gh_tree.min_cut_value(n0,n2));

    // Example: For the line graph, the tree structure would be:
    // 0 --10.0-- 1
    // 1 --5.0--- 2
    // min_cut_value(0,2) traverses 0-1 (10.0) and 1-2 (5.0), bottleneck is 5.0.

    // To visualize the tree (e.g., print in DOT format):
    // println!("\nGraphviz DOT format of the Gomory-Hu tree:\n{}", gh_tree.to_dot());
    Ok(())
}

Algorithm Background

The Gomory-Hu Cut Tree (R. E. Gomory and T. C. Hu, 1961) is a data structure that represents the minimum s-t cuts for all N(N-1)/2 vertex pairs in an undirected graph. It is a weighted tree where edges correspond to min-cuts in the original graph. The min-cut value between any two nodes s and t in the original graph is equal to the minimum capacity of any edge on the unique path between s and t in the Gomory-Hu tree.

This implementation uses Gusfield's simplified algorithm (D. Gusfield, 1990), which requires N-1 max-flow computations, avoiding graph contractions used in the original Gomory-Hu method.

Current Implementation Details

Query Complexity: GomoryHuTree::min_cut_value is currently O(N) (where N is number of vertices in original graph) due to a Breadth-First Search (BFS) on the tree edges to find the path and its bottleneck capacity. Future optimizations could use Lowest Common Ancestor (LCA) algorithms for O(log N) or O(alpha(N)) queries if a more advanced tree data structure is used internally.
Error Handling: Errors from max-flow computations or graph inconsistencies are propagated via MaxFlowError (from the solver) and GomoryHuError (from tree construction).
Graph Input: The primary graph input AdjacencyListFlowGraph is a directed graph. To model undirected edges for Gomory-Hu construction (which operates on undirected graphs), users should add pairs of directed edges (i.e., u->v and v->u both with the same capacity).
petgraph: The AdjacencyListFlowGraph uses petgraph::Graph internally for graph storage.

Performance

Performance benchmarks for tree construction and min-cut queries are included in the crate. You can run them using:

cargo bench

The results will be available in the target/criterion directory. Current observations indicate that tree construction is the most computationally intensive part, as expected, due to the N-1 max-flow computations. Query performance is linear with the number of nodes.

Applications

Gomory-Hu trees are useful in various domains:

Network Reliability: Analyzing connectivity and bottlenecks in networks.
Computer Vision: Image segmentation tasks.
Clustering: Identifying clusters in data by finding minimum cuts.
Bioinformatics: Analyzing biological networks.

Advanced Features (Future Work)

O(log N) or O(alpha(N)) min-cut queries using LCA.
Support for no_std environments (currently std is a default feature).
More sophisticated graph representations or adapters.
Parallelization of max-flow computations within Gusfield's algorithm (if feasible and beneficial).
Extraction of the actual min-cut partition (not just the value) from the tree or during its construction.

Validation

The crate includes:

Unit tests for individual components.
Integration tests based on academic examples (e.g., small, known graphs).
Property-based tests using proptest to verify key properties of the Gomory-Hu tree (e.g., cut equivalence, tree structure) over a wide range of randomly generated graphs.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit issues, bug reports, or pull requests. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss the proposed changes.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license.

gomory-hu-tree 1.0.0